Methodology

Health score

A 0–100 blend of four sub-scores, each answering one question a person asks before installing. Grades: A ≥ 85, B ≥ 70, C ≥ 55, D ≥ 40, F below that.

Health is deliberately slow-moving: it measures whether a plugin is cared for, not whether it shipped a release this month. Download momentum used to sit here, but wp.org downloads are dominated by auto-update pushes, so it swung a plugin's grade on release timing rather than quality. Growth now lives on the movers boards, measured on installs. A security sub-score is reserved (15% when active) and its weight is held open until vulnerability data ships.

Adjusted rating

Raw star averages reward tiny samples: a 5.0★ plugin with 4 reviews is weaker evidence than a 4.6★ plugin with 900. We apply Bayesian shrinkage toward the directory-wide average (3.9★) with the pull of twelve phantom reviews, so small samples drift toward typical and large samples speak for themselves. That is why an adjusted rating always sits slightly below a small plugin's raw average.

Install estimates

WordPress.org reports active installs only in coarse buckets ("40K+"). The true value sits between that bucket and the next one up. We narrow the tier using the date the plugin last crossed into its bucket, its download velocity since, and daily snapshots of our own. Estimates are labeled "modeled" until we hold enough of our own observations to call them "tracked".

Honest rankings

We replicated WordPress.org's search scoring from its public source: the install-count factor grows without any ceiling, so raw distribution dominates placement. Our merit re-rank applies the same inputs with three changes: the install factor is capped at one million active installs, ratings are weighted by review volume with a statistical lower bound (Wilson interval), and freshness/compatibility decay stays as wp.org has it. "Inflation" is the gap between a plugin's wp.org position and its merit position.

Signals on ranking rows

• install-weight boost — wp.org places this plugin 4+ positions above its merit rank, and the install-count factor supplies most of its wp.org score. This describes how the algorithm weighs the plugin. It says nothing about how those installs were acquired, and it is not an accusation against the developer.
• thin reviews — fewer than 25 reviews, so rating evidence is weak.
• low rating, top placement — under 3.5★ while holding a top-5 spot.
• stale but ranked — no update in 18 months while holding a top-10 spot.

History signals

Every daily snapshot stores installs, downloads, rating, review count, health, and directory rank per plugin. The trend surfaces below are derived from that archive; none of them use any data beyond what the snapshots already contain.

• Rating trend and review velocity: the star average charted over time, plus new reviews per week averaged over the trailing 90 days. Flat series are hidden.
• Health trend: the same composite health score, snapshotted daily and charted per plugin. The Health page lists the biggest gains and drops between two dates.
• Stickiness: 30-day downloads per 1,000 active installs. Update releases spike it; a long slide means an aging install base.
• Directory rank: the plugin's position in the directory's popularity order, recorded at crawl time daily since 2026-07-12 and charted per plugin against its closest rivals. Earlier rank history from the archive is charted too, but the two eras are never mixed, because they ranked different plugin sets.
• Milestone velocity: how long a plugin sat in each install tier before crossing, and a projected date for the next tier from the least-squares trend of the last 180 days of installs. Projections beyond five years are suppressed.
• Install spikes: install tiers that multiplied by 3x or more in a single observation. This feed describes the jump only; big jumps sometimes have honest causes, and conduct conclusions belong to the integrity thresholds below.
• Keyword tracking: wp.org search positions recorded daily for a fixed keyword list and for any keyword whose rankings page has ever been visited. wp.org keeps no public history of these, so the trend starts the day tracking begins.

Integrity watch

Separately from ranking signals, a plugin is flagged as artificially boosted only when hard thresholds are all met at once: 200,000+ active installs, a rating under 3★, almost nobody reviewing it relative to its size (fewer than 50 reviews per 100,000 installs), a statistically robust negative review consensus (Wilson lower bound under 0.4), and a published WP Mayor investigation documenting what happened. That is the only label on the site that implies conduct, which is why the bar is high and the evidence is linked.

A second, neutral flag marks install bases that don't reflect chosen adoption. People review plugins they picked; across the directory, plugins installed by choice sit well above 10 reviews per 10,000 installs. So at 50,000+ installs, fewer than 1 review per 10,000 installs earns the flag on the ratio alone. Between 10,000 and 50,000 installs the ratio is ambiguous (a niche-but-real plugin can look the same), so the flag additionally requires the install trajectory to show a long plateau followed by a multi-tier climb within weeks: the shape of a distribution change, not organic growth. This flag makes no accusation. Bundling and preinstallation are legitimate ways to ship software; the flag only says the install count is a weak popularity signal, so these plugins sit out the install-based leaderboards while their health grade is untouched. Officially promoted publishers (WordPress.org, the Performance Team, Automattic) are exempt: their thin review trails come from core and directory promotion, not commercial bundling.

Independence

Every score, rank and flag on this site is computed from the data and thresholds described above, or backed by a published WP Mayor review. Nothing here is set by hand or by relationship. If a plugin ranks well, its numbers earned it; if one is flagged, a stated threshold was crossed or an investigation documented it, and the evidence is linked.

Two relationships are worth stating plainly. Plugin Pulse is built by WP Mayor, which also sells a paid plugin-promotion service; and its founder runs RebelCode, whose plugins (WP RSS Aggregator, Spotlight) appear in this dataset like any other. Neither buys standing here. Promotion spend never moves a health or merit score, and never lifts or suppresses an integrity flag. RebelCode's plugins are scored by the same formulas as everything else, with no exemption. The whole point of the site is a signal you can trust, so the moment a score could be bought, it would be worthless.

Data

Live data comes from the public WordPress.org APIs. Trend history combines our own daily snapshots with a historical archive assembled from public sources, and every stored data point is tagged with its origin. Download history reaches back to October 2022 for most tracked plugins. Plugin Pulse is built by WP Mayor and is not affiliated with WordPress.org.